Tuesday, April 30, 2013

3 versions of liberty

Last night, as I lay in bed and waited for sleep, like a
good little insomniac, I thought about the dialectic of freedom. It didn’t put
me to sleep. So, here I am, the next day, putting words to my sleep deprived
thoughts.

In the Anglosphere, the problem of liberty has been narrowly
framed by a tradition reaching from Benjamin Constant to Isaiah Berlin, in
which the supreme contrast is between negative liberty and positive liberty. In
Two Concepts of Liberty, Berlin speaks of negative liberty in terms of
compulsion:

“I am normally said to be free to the degree to which no human
being interferes

with my activity. Political liberty in this sense is simply the
area within which a

man can act unobstructed by others. If I am prevented by
other persons from

doing what I could otherwise do,I am to that degree unfree;
and if this area is

contracted by other men beyond a certain minimum, I can be
described as

being coerced, or, it may be, enslaved.”

Positive liberty, for Berlin, is the liberty implied by “being
one’s own master.” It is, in other words, autonomy, and not simply being
buffered from various coercive acts.

However, in philosophy, as in Looney Tunes, there is more
than one way to skin a cat. And, in philosophy as in Looney Tunes, in the end
the skinned cat will slink back with a whole new skin. It is the nature of the
beast. Novalis said that God is a problem whose solution is another problem,
which is a high falutin way of saying the same thing.

So instead of beginning with freedom as being, firstly, a
matter of the human, let’s begin with the ancient notion of freedom, which from
the Daoists to the Stoics consists of being free from property. The sage and
the fool are the paragon figures of freedom – one, by an act of generosity,
liberates himself by the simple but massive act of giving away his chains – and
the other has no chains to impede him anyway, but exists as a conduit for God’s
occasional flashes of lightning.

This idea of freedom derives its coloring from a world view
that projects a society of slave or serfholders on the cosmic order. The
generous act – the act of giving away – is a form of power, and it has a
certain sacred backlighting.

Among the early moderns, those stalwart visionaries of a
capitalism to be, the coordinates of freedom are reversed. It is here that
Berlin’s two freedoms have there focus. The propertarian notion of liberty is
that, precisely, the preservation of one’s property against encroachment is the
essence of freedom. The libertarian tendency in the U.S. is just the
psychopathological outgrowth of this revolution in values. For the ancients, of
course, this would have been absurd – it is as if the slave imagined he were
free by carefully protecting his chains against all comers.

The third idea of freedom I’d call the existential one –
with a strong mixture of Marxism. It echoes the ancient wisdom, while absorbing
the historical lesson of modernity. For the existentialist, like the Marxist,
makes property subordinate to life – and in particular, to time. Marx’s
approach to the labor embodied in properties – which sees the measure and
dynamic of that labor in time – is a key insight here. Freedom can’t be
divorced from the time one spends laboring. For the Marxist, and the
existentialist, capitalism has, in essence, abolished the old aristocratic
categories of the serf, the slave and the poor. The poor no longer exist as a
social residue and charity case, but as an exploitable mass from which class
power is extracted. In the Marxist vision, all labor exists to be routinized,
mechanized, and made more efficient for capital. On the other side of the
divide, however, stand the capitalist who are also pursuing routines. For a
time, those routines are valorized to a hypertrophic extent: while the cashier
is replaced by the automatic checkout machine, the CEO is attributed a mystical
power of governance and leadership, instead of considered in terms of the
regression to the mean that governs his sector. The latter then is paid enormously,
while the former is paid less and less. The former’s time is, in other words,
devalued.

Eventually, Marx expected all professions to become
proletarianized. This hasn’t happened yet, as we have an elaborate and not well
understood guild system that keeps the doctor and the dentist from falling
victim to the mechanization instinct of capitalism. One can easily imagine that
eventually, the artificial economic paradise carved out by these guilds will
fall, too. At some point, pure capital, pure property, will reign supreme over
a propertyless mass, which has paid with its time for its surroundings, but
does not, when push comes to shove, own anything – rather, every thing,
underneath a veil of middle class security, is actually rented.

Freedom, from the existentialist point of view, is the
project of actually releasing human time from the system of property relations
in which it is held captive. The existential version of freedom, then, is both
utopian and highly dependent on the movement of the social towards the final
crisis of the capitalist system.

Now, given these three ways of thinking about liberty, we
can understand why the libertarian is such a fascinating figure for the liberal.
It is as if they form a couple, with the libertarian being the trickster and
the liberal being the straight man. Together, they represent the fool position.
Meanwhile, we wait, we wait patiently, for the arrival of the sage.

About Me

MANY YEARS LATER as he faced the firing squad, Roger Gathman was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover
ice. Or rather, to discover the profit making potential of selling bags of ice to picnicking Atlantans, the most glorious of the old man's Get Rich schemes, the one that devoured the most energy, the one that seemed so rational for a time, the one that, like all the others - the farm, the housebuilding business, the plastic sign business, chimney cleaning, well drilling, candy machine renting - was drawn by an inexorable black hole that opened up between skill and lack of business sense, imagination and macro-economics, to blow a huge hole in the family savings account. But before discovering the ice machine at 12, Roger had discovered many other things - for instance, he had a distinct memory of learning how to tie his shoes. It was in the big colonial, a house in the Syracuse metro area that had been built to sell and that stubbornly wouldn't - hence, the family had moved into it. He remembered bending over the shoes, he remembered that clumsy feeling in his hands - clumsiness, for the first time, had a habitation, it was made up of this obscure machine, the shoe, and it presaged a lifetime of struggle with machine after machine.